Igor Sysoev

Creator and developer of the nginx Web server.¹

Born Sep 28, 1970.¹

About

Igor Vladimirovich Sysoev (Russian: Игорь Владимирович Сысоев) is a Russian software engineer. In October 2004, he released the nginx web server, reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTP cache software and founded Nginx, Inc.

Sysoev was born in 1970 and grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, at the time called Alma-Ata in the Kazakh SSR. Sysoev graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University in 1994. Since graduation, he has lived in Moscow.

On 13 December 2019, Sysoev was detained by the authorities concerning what has been asserted to be a copyright claim, on the basis that Sysoev was an employee of Rambler in the 2000s when he wrote the early versions of nginx. On 16 December 2019, Russian state lender Sberbank, which owns 46.5 percent of Rambler, called an extraordinary meeting of Rambler's board of directors asking Rambler's management team to request Russian law enforcement agencies cease pursuit of the criminal case, and begin talks with nginx and its owner F5.

On 18 January 2022, it was announced that Sysoev had left Nginx, Inc. and F5, Inc. "to spend more time with his friends and family and to pursue personal projects".

From Wikipedia’s article on Igor Sysoev, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.²

Companies

Nginx, Inc.Founder¹³

Early life and education

Date not recordedBauman Moscow State Technical University³

Early years

Igor was born in a small town in Kazakhstan, then part of the USSR into a family of a Soviet military. Later his father was transferred to Alma-Ata, where Igor lived until the age of 18. His computer experience started with Yamaha MSX computers at the local Pioneers Palace (youth center). He recalls his first program being bugged with small mistakes like confusing I and 1 that kept it from running.

Sysoev graduated from high-school in 1987 and tried to join the MGTU im. Baumana (technical university) in Moscow, Russian Socialist Republic, but failed at the first attempt. Back home, he started working at the lab of the Institute of Teacher Education under the USSR Ministry of Geology. There he started coding in BASIC on old Iskra-2 PCs.

His first significant and distributable program was antivirus AV, created in 1989-1990, written entirely in assembly code that spanned 100 KB. It could search for several known viruses raging in the USSR at that time (Marijuana, Sophia, Vienna and other), was copied as a binary executable and gradually became popular, even being installed on production plants. Grateful users kept sending in more variants of viruses, that were enrolled into new versions, but by 1992 Igor had lost interest in updating it.

Graduating in 1994 he already had experience of system administration for a year for an oil company, and stayed with that company for almost 7 years. He spent half a year in the internet shop XXL.RU, joining Rambler, one of the leading Russian web portals, in November 13, 2000.

From Wikipedia’s article on Igor Sysoev (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: entrepreneur, engineer, computer scientist, programmer.⁶

Date not recordedFounded nginx⁴
Date not recordedFounded Nginx, Inc.⁵

Personal life

BornSep 28, 1970, Almaty⁷
CitizenshipSoviet Union, Russia⁸
ResidenceMoscow⁹

Philanthropy

Company foundation

The company had international ambitions right from the very beginning, both because it helped attract investments and because the product had a world appeal, while Russia's market was too small and not ready for the paid support model. The two owners had little knowledge of international sales procedures and didn't hope to gain the skills quickly enough. That prompted a goal of opening an American office and hiring an American director.

The company had been staying under the radar for some time, and customers were unaware of the commercial support option. Igor recalls finding his correspondence from 2011 naive, as it suggested the idea of selling technical support for an open source project. It was a popular trend of the time, but few could succeed with it.

By 2013 the company had yet no paying customers with its subscription service NGINX Plus, but was cooperating with Netflix, helping them build a network of CDN servers based on FreeBSD and nginx. The alliance was quickly able to speed each server up from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s and then to 40 Gbit/s of traffic.

The same year the company had millions of users of the free version and more than 1500 customers paying for additional modules. Their marketing muscle amounted to zero, Igor recalls, which the company countered by hiring Gus Robertson, former vice-president of Red Hat, in 2013.

The company had 10–13 staff in 2013 and grew to 250 by 2019 in all 5 countries of presence (Russia, United States, Ireland, Singapore, Australia), of whom 70 were engineers, 33 employees were located in Moscow.